I’d like to discuss all of the things surrounding the ideas of design that are presented in fiction/speculatively: the style in which they’re presented, the fashion of the people that present them, the medium in which they’re presented with. Culturally, does that have an impact in addition to the actual ideas produced?

Looking at some of the videos from this week’s readings, the second thing that I’m assaulted with after the speculative technologies is the quality of the video and how the people are dressed/styled/talking. See Here:

Religiously, I’d consider myself Agnostic; I can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a higher power. Essentially, it’s not even worth thinking about — there’s so many possibilities, infinite possibilities in fact, and the odds are overwhelming that I’m not going to be able to determine a concrete answer without divine intervention. The right answer is probably one I can’t even physically imagine in my current state of being and location in history. My brain has better things to do.

I experience Design Fiction in two distinct ways: one — the stuff that comes out of it is really cool and though provoking, and two — who cares? Why even speculate on it, if those speculations are almost certainly not going to come true? Now improvisation — I can get behind that. Being able to adjust and adapt to new information with conviction and agility is a much more useful skill than soothsaying.

It seems like you’re just developing a continuation of the world we have now; the biggest changes in history were not incremental changes, they were not things we had envisioned — they were things we formerly thought to be impossible, or things we couldn’t even imagine.

Additionally, why were you focusing on creating a collaborative future, if it was obvious that everyone involved would be unhappy with the finished product? Humanity’s past and present has been collaborative, but humanity’s past and present didn’t have access to the technologies we will have in the future. If collaborative worlds are undesirable, why aren’t we working towards making individual futures?

Blah blah blah workshops teamwork ideas synergy. Boring. What is the value in creating new speculative literature when the world is already rife with it? Nothing is new; everything is just a reshuffle and evolution of old. I like crowdsourcing. I like making.

The only thing I found convincing, human, about the scenarios outlined in The Power of 8 was the youth-hackery of rain-filled clouds. Everything else seemed like the academic, utopian dreams of architects, artists, and someone who reads the news. Maybe a pedestrian future is your future — it sure isn’t mine.

So, how do individual identities not get affected by collaboration? Should they? Why must my future world be invaded by the worlds of others? And, from the website, why does technology need to be humanized?

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what would it take to make a movie of Bladerunner’s imaginative power, set in a positive future?” He paused for a second and said he thought it’d be very difficult, that catharsis is so important to people, and people are so terrified of the future, that you’d need some completely new vision of what the future will look like to even set the scene for a new narrative… and that is obviously no mean feat.

Is there such thing as a positive future? In cinema, futures usually are portrayed as dystopian, but they’re always filmed from the lens of the protagonist; a movie without an antagonist is boring. Real life without an antagonist is boring.

Utopia is a place that exists only in children’s movies and in religion. It doesn’t exist now and it hasn’t existed in the past, so it’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine it in the future. I don’t think we’re terrified of the future — I for one welcome our robot overlords — I think we’re unable to remove our minds from the past and present. Speculative design says it’s looking forward, but it’s really just looking around. Crowdsourced SD even more so. Very rarely does a piece truly move us beyond what we are now. And when it does happen, we’re too busy looking at the other stuff to notice.